"Your friends are in trouble," I respond with a faint shrug. "I feel like any reasonable person would understand why you had to go. Particularly if you've never met one another. Social duty should never trump the importance of someone's life."

"It's not really him I'm worried about, honestly. I don't know him, he might be perfectly lovely. It's my father - his parents." Sighing, I adjust my head against the window. "I'm in my head. There's no point to it."

"Then I'd hope the same for your father and his parents," I frown slightly as I glance at her. "What's the point of seeing to your duty and having a successful lineage if you're not happy? What are you doing besides making new poths who also get the pressure to be unhappy so they can make more children who'll also be unhappy? It seems like a vicious cycle. Live first, then see to your duty."

I hesitate for a moment as I watch the road before glancing at her. "Also: I had no idea you were only seventeen..."

"My mother married my father at fourteen." I respond with a shrug, "My cousins have married, one at twelve and the other fourteen. I think the only reason my father held off until now was because other's find me peculiar.

"You didn't mean about my age in regards to marriage, did you?" I ask as I pick my head up to look at him.

"I don't know," I frown quietly, my nails dragging across the fabric of my pants absently as I stare at the road. "In a way, yes? I keep telling myself I've moved on since Maja died, but it's not really true. I bed strangers for money... I never would have done that before. But now? It's the only way I feel safe enough getting close to someone - it's just a given that I won't get to keep them, so I don't ever have to think about it.

"And I don't," I breathe. "I never think about Maja or Ljuba or what happened. After I left, I drank myself into a stupor for months, and when I bounced back into sobriety, it was like it never happened. I never allowed myself to think about them or anything that happened during that time of my life. I locked everything away, even the fishing trips I took with my dad, because it was too risky to linger on it. I just pushed forward with half of myself shut down for business.

"Maybe facing the man that did this will help me get past it," I shrug. "Maybe I'll finally be able to get on with my life and stop running, you know?"

"I don't know," I breathe, shaking my head roughly as a lump threatens to form in my throat. "I can't even really think about all of that yet. I wanted one, very much so. Now... I have no idea what I want."

"It is," I admit with a light laugh. "That's one of the reasons I was never in any hurry to move past this most recent phase in my life. It's exciting, going somewhere new, meeting new people. Now that I'm pushing forward, it's both frightening and exciting. I'm learning new things about myself... I might not even be the same person when all of this is through."

"Honestly, it's not all good things," I laugh, shaking my head. "I've learned I'm more inclined toward this kind of life than I expected... that even after half a decade, I'm still holding onto grudges and that I'm not as forgiving as I'd once thought. And in the face of it all, I'm... I don't know, stoic? After the initial panic when Ljuba was taken, I just felt hard. And not the good kind of hard."

"Yeah, he's a very intense bloke, isn't he?" I laugh a bit as I glance over my shoulder into the back. "Very emotional. I'd have thought after a century, he'd be more collected. Instead he's like a twenty year old who just lost his first girlfriend."

"Hmm," I sigh, leaning my head over my arm to peer back towards the sleeping man. "I remember reading about echoes, when my dad would be too busy with ones he didn't like me around. They have this constant battle inside of them. Power, indulgence, survival, all these opposing needs. Some theorize that, from an evolutionary standpoint, the echoes shouldn't even exist. They were more a stepping stone between eras, and the stragglers that are still among us are on their way out.

"On top of that, they tend to be addiction prone, depressed, reckless. That leads to poverty, which leads to more addiction, depression and recklessness. They're sort of eternal teenagers, if you think about it. The rest of us get older, settle in. We leave our vices behind, have families, and just live. Doesn't seem to work that way for them."